The present invention relates to the internal circuitry of a graphics processing unit (GPU), and more particularly, to a graphics processing method and an associated graphics processing apparatus.
A conventional portable electronic device such as a conventional mobile phone may have a processor (e.g. a central processing unit (CPU)) to control operations of the conventional portable electronic device, and may further have a conventional GPU to perform graphics related calculations. According to the related art, the conventional GPU can be implemented to be suitable for the conventional immediate rendering technologies or the conventional tile-based rendering (TBR) technologies. However, some problems may occur. For example, as it seems unlikely that the entire frame can be stored inside the chip of the conventional GPU, the conventional immediate rendering technologies typically require a lot of memory access operations that are unnecessary. More particularly, in some situations, the conventional immediate rendering technologies may cause an irregular access order, which may decrease the memory access efficiency. In another example, in comparison with the conventional immediate rendering technologies, the conventional TBR technologies typically require extra hardware costs. More particularly, the conventional TBR technologies may need extra memory allocation.
In conclusion, both of the conventional immediate rendering technologies and the conventional TBR technologies have their own limitations, and they are weak in graphics processing and may need a lot of bandwidth for some scenarios. Thus, a novel architecture is required for saving memory usage and bandwidth.